Technology Touchdown: Simplifying and Automating Contract Management in Professional Football

Professional sports franchises are businesses just like any other. Even though their “product” is unique and something so many of us love, much of their day to day operations revolve around less sensational paperwork: contracts with customers, partners, vendors, non-pigskin playing employees – the list goes on.

The key to any contract is signatures – otherwise it’s really just a document. However, I think we can all agree that using a pen to sign is getting old. The demand for electronic signatures is growing at a rapid pace and the step of signing a contract is often just one part of a larger process.

That’s why K2 has a strategic partnership and integration with DocuSign. By utilizing K2 along with DocuSign, customers can create end-to-end business process applications that easily capture digital signatures and streamline back office process work involving documents. The way these two technologies and platforms unite enables customers to drastically reduce the time it takes to get a signature and maintain visibility into the entire contract process, including a full audit trail of all the steps.

One K2 customer that is doing exactly this in their business today happens to be a professional football franchise. This franchise is using K2's out-of-the-box integration with DocuSign to digitize and automate the process of booking cheerleader and mascot appearances.

“The mascot and cheerleaders receive hundreds of [appearance] requests a month,” said the franchise’s senior director of business information systems. “The mascot fulfills probably two or three a day, and the cheerleaders, given that there are 50-some cheerleaders they are continually fulfilling requests every day.”

“Before we switched over to K2, it was a long process to try and get an appearance from the initial stages to the completed stages,” said the mascot program coordinator.

The franchise largely maintained the process through emails, phone calls, paper forms and spreadsheets. “One of the largest problems was that it took a lot of administrative time to actually book and took away from the actual appearance time with our fans,” said the senior director. Now, the coordinators for the cheerleaders and the mascot use K2 and DocuSign to manage the entire process.

This has vastly transformed the process both from an end-user and administrative perspective. Instead of filling out paper forms or making a phone call, clients looking to book an appearance are able to fill out a form online that includes details about who they are and their event. The data from that form is imported into the franchise’s K2 app – kicking off several automated tasks, like the creation of the contract. Tracking the rest of the process becomes much easier.

“The creation of the appearance contracts has been so much easier because the workflow system will generate the contract based on all the data that was entered. The working relationship between K2 and DocuSign has made it so easy because the contract will be automatically imported into the DocuSign system, I just have to go in and verify details and send it right off to the client. Doesn’t take any time at all,” said the mascot program coordinator.

Not only has the process been transformational for the business, but it was quick and easy to build in the first place. “The actual time to build out the K2 process took maybe two to three weeks,” said the senior director. “I can’t even imagine how long it would’ve taken to build a solution like the one we built in K2 for cheer and mascot on our own, I don’t think we could’ve actually done it in-house. We would’ve had to coordinate with other partners to do the development and it would’ve cost a lot of money.”

In the end, the most important thing to this franchise is the time they get to spend in the community with their fans. “Before we were working with K2, I would spend a lot of time in the office having to manually process all these appearances and wasn’t able to spend the time I wanted to in the community. This is the closest that a lot of people will get to a professional football team so we’re able to bring that game day experience to them and they get very excited. We want to create those experiences that people will remember forever; K2 and DocuSign are helping us achieve those goals,” said the mascot coordinator.

Learn more about what this professional football team is doing with K2 and DocuSign so you can implement something similar for your business.

Join us in an upcoming webinar with DocuSign, K2 and the senior director from the team’s IT department. You’ll hear in the director’s own words why the team turned to K2 and DocuSign and how it helps them deliver game day experiences to their fans. Register here.

Want to learn even more? Contact us and we’ll discuss how we can help you in your process automation journey today.